From FedoraProject

ROS has traditionally only supported a self-contained installation from version control, typically somewhere like ~/ros or /opt/ros. While Debian and Ubuntu packages exist for many ROS components, they are hosted by the ROS community and onl support installation to /opt/ros. Beginning with ROS Fuerte (released 2012-04-23), the ROS community is moving towards conforming with the FHS (REP 122.)

Now that the ROS community are targeting an FHS-compatible layout, it should be possible to generate binary packages for ROS components and get them accepted into Fedora proper (distribution acceptance is one of the stated reasons for the switch.) This page summarizes the progress towards getting a full working ROS installation into Fedora.

Progress

ROS Core

These packages come from the "ros-underlay" source distribution, and all share the same SRPM. (ros-fuerte-1.8.7). The ros-fuerte rpm is based on a snapshot of the ros-underlay, taken on 2012-05-17. The source can be obtained by using the command:

A "rosinstall" SRPM is available in the ROS Utilities section. More detailed instructions for how to obtain the ros-underlay and rosinstall through easy_install are available in the official ROS Fedora installation instructions.

ROS Utilities

These packages are usually installed with easy_install or pip. They come from various Willow Garage repositories on github and wg-kforge. These packages contain some python utilities and libraries that aren't included in the ROS core source (the "ros-underlay.")

Stacks

These are individual stacks that rely on each other and on the ROS Core. They all get installed to /usr/share/ros-stacks/stackname

Stacks can be downloaded as tarballs from the ROS Release archive. Each stack's directory contains a plain tarball, debian package source, and a yaml file. We can use the plain tarball for packaging, and the .yaml files generally have brief and full descriptions of the stack, inter-stack dependencies, and package dependencies that we can use to help write the .spec files.